Here's the big stage news. Harry Potter is to be turned into a West End play (then, presumably, Broadway, then...shhh!). J.K. Rowling has announced on her website, then reported by The Stage newspaper, that after many offers, a play will indeed be produced and will focus on Potter's early years. The producers will be West End regular Sonia Friedman and former HBO Films president Colin Callender. Rowling will not herself author the script.
No writer or director has yet been confirmed, however, let alone any stars. So what do we think? First, it's a risky venture. The Potter books have been a global phenomenon (not entirely sure why, I must admit, being more in the How to Train Your Dragon camp in terms of current children's books, and a die-hard fan of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence when it comes to children's fantasy sagas). The films, expertly done and stuffed to the brim with the cream of British acting talent, have similarly been colossal successes--enough that tourists touching down at London's Heathrow Airport will see huge advertisements for nearby Pinewood Studios' "Harry Potter Experience" (the spaces where the Potters were filmed having been turned into a money-making shrine). So, Rowling is playing with her legacy here.
Or is she? We Brits all like to pontificate about the importance of the West End. And, of course, it is important. But the many book-to-stage disasters haven't really dented the book. The Lord of the Rings wasn't hurt in the slightest by the failure of the huge budget musical that landed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane--neither the books nor Peter Jackson's ongoing film saga. When it goes well, as with War Horse, say, or The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (maybe a bad example since the theater where that is playing recently suffered a dreadful ceiling collapse) or even Roald Dahl's Matilda, it can have an enormously positive effect on its source. And of course it can make a lot of money. When it tanks, well, blink and you've missed it.
So much for that. Let's get into the more fun game of fantasy West End and try and cast this ourselves. Potter depends on an acutely atmospheric sense of Britishness, so the producers are likely to want a British director with a good pedigree in both tradition, innovation and indeed commercial success. Which puts the balance of expectation, surely, on Sir Richard Eyre, former head of the National Theatre and (despite the less than adulatory reception given to his latest, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Stephen Ward) deliverer of solid hits. His Mary Poppins, a truly great adaptation of book and screen to stage, was beautifully done.
So, Eyre, if he wants the job, could be in pole position. Other likely candidates would be Nicholas Hytner, outgoing National Theatre chief who made very English hits of Alan Bennett's The Madness of George III and The History Boys (and, less English but enormous, Miss Saigon). Or there's Stephen Daldry, who reinvented Billy Elliott as a (superb) musical and Priestley potboiler An Inspector Calls as a postmodern view of social apocalypse. All very British.
And a writer? Downton Abbey scribe Julian Fellowes, Eyre's writer for Poppins, might want to have a bash and would seem a natural. A less predictable choice would be Doctor Who and Sherlock lead writer Stephen Moffat, a proven juggler of supernatural suspense and pop-culture mythology. Whether he has stage chops has yet to be proven, but there is a theatricality to his writing. And he has worked closely, albeit in TV, with stage producer and former chief executive of Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group André Ptaszynski, who is close to Friedman.
As for cast, take your pick. Many of the actors from the films are regulars, or at least semi-regulars, on stage. Much will depend on the choice of writer and certainly director. One reason perhaps to plump for Moffat is the idea of his new Doctor, Peter Capaldi, as a Dumbledore rather less tolerant, shall we say, than Michael Gambon's (if you don't know what we're talking about, check out genius Brit TV satire The Thick of It). The big question will be whether Daniel Radcliffe will be involved. We'd guess, in short, no.
